Five Books That Include Memorable Graduation Scenes

After graduate school, I hung around the academy teaching English for a dozen years in the Midwest. The only serious downside to that career was having to attend graduation every spring. Often I sat so far back on the dais that I could safely catch up on some reading without being seen by the giddy students and impoverished parents. But most years I had to maintain that look of cerebral attention expected of professors dressed in moldy black sheets.

I heard more than a few barons and baronesses of industry refer to "the river of life," "our responsibilities to a world crying out for solutions" and "the immortal words of so-and-so." And yet, wouldn't you know it, now I kind of miss that rhetorical rite of spring. So here, in this season of graduation speeches, is a list of novels that include memorable commencement addresses. Can you think of some others -- in real life or books? Let us know.

1. I Love You, Beth Cooper, by Larry Doyle. Geeky Denis Cooverman decides to announce his adoration for a popular cheerleader during his high school graduation speech. This is news to her. And to her ferocious boyfriend. The next 24 hours are full of cringe-inducing teenage antics. (Doyle is a former writer for "The Simpsons.")

4. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou. The poet's first autobiography is not a novel, I realize, but it reads like one. In the most frequently anthologized chapter, a white administrator delivers a thoroughly deflating and subtly racist graduation speech, but the African American students in Maya's 8th-grade class rise to the challenge.

5. The Sooner Spy, by Jim Lehrer. At the last minute, Mack, the one-eyed lieutenant governor of Oklahoma, is pressed into delivering a commencement address at Oklahoma Southeastern State College. He ends with good advice: "Congratulations to you all. It is unlikely that any of you will have occasion to remember either me or my commencement address. I don't blame you. But if by chance something does linger, I hope it's just that there was a one-eyed guy up here who kept saying, 'Risk. Risk. The way to happiness is to risk it.' "